Lojas Renner Brand Guidelines: A.J. Renner’s 1912 Factory, a 1965 Spin-Off & Montevideo

A Porto Alegre factory and its wool capes.

Lojas Renner S.A. is a fashion retailer with its headquarters in Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, and its shares listed on B3, the São Paulo exchange. The company says the Renner name goes back to Antônio Jacob Renner, of German descent and settled in Rio Grande do Sul, who started the A. J. Renner group in 1912 as a factory in the Navegantes district of Porto Alegre. Portuguese Wikipedia adds that the family came from São Sebastião do Caí, about 60 km from the capital, and that flax plantations supplied linen for the men’s clothing the group made.

In 1922 the group opened its first point of sale in Porto Alegre, selling its own textiles. The company says its staple was a pure-wool men’s cape sold as the Capa Ideal, made for cold, wind and rain and worn by gaúchos of the Campanha region, travelling salesmen and city men alike. From 1940, the company says, the shop sold a wider mix and became a department store; Portuguese Wikipedia dates the first department store, the Loja Otávio Rocha, to 1945, adding departments for small appliances, furniture, sporting goods and bed, bath and table linen.

In 1965 the A. J. Renner group split up its businesses, and Lojas Renner S.A. was constituted as a separate company; it became a listed company in 1967. Two founding dates are therefore in use: 1912 for the industrial group and 1965 for the retailer, the year the company’s own history page gives for the start of its story. At the end of 1991, the company says, it went through a full restructuring and replaced the general department store with a department store specialised in fashion. It then left its home state, opening in Santa Catarina in 1994, Paraná in 1996 and São Paulo in 1997, and in 2003 it stopped selling homeware and bed, bath and table linen to concentrate on clothing and accessories.

J. C. Penney, the Novo Mercado and two neighbours.

At the end of 1998 control of Lojas Renner passed to J. C. Penney, then one of the main department store chains in the United States; Portuguese Wikipedia says the buyer was its Brazilian subsidiary and that more than 30 stores followed in the South, Southeast and Centre-West of Brazil. From 2002, Portuguese Wikipedia says, collections were developed around lifestyles and built from own-label brands, and stores began to display products in coordinated groups. In 2005 J. C. Penney sold all its shares on B3, leaving the company with no controlling shareholder, and on the same day Lojas Renner joined the Novo Mercado, the B3 listing segment with stricter corporate governance rules, the company says. The first stores in the Northeast, in Pernambuco, Ceará and Bahia, followed in 2006, and the first in the North, in Amazonas, in 2007; online sales began in 2010.

Lojas Renner then grew into a group of store brands. It bought Camicado, a home and decoration chain, in 2011, launched Youcom, a format for younger shoppers, in 2013, and launched Ashua Curve & Plus Size in 2016, the company says. Mercado&Consumo reported that at the end of June 2017 the group had 310 Renner stores, 93 Camicado stores and 70 Youcom stores. As of November 2026 the company’s own site describes more than 700 stores in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay and more than 26,000 staff.

The first Renner store outside Brazil opened in September 2017 on Avenida 18 de Julio in Montevideo, a four-floor unit of about 2,500 square metres, Mercado&Consumo reported; the company cited Uruguay’s high income per head and rising domestic consumption among its reasons for choosing Montevideo. The same title reported on 16 December 2019 that four stores were opening in Argentina between 12 and 18 December that year, two in Córdoba, at Patio Olmos and Paseo del Jockey, and two street stores in Buenos Aires, on Avenida Santa Fe and Calle Florida, while two more Montevideo openings took the chain to nine units in Uruguay by the end of 2019.

Design and documentation.

Brazilian retailers present themselves first through the shop. Many national chains grew by buying regional ones and then putting their own name over the door, so a single shop name, painted on façades in towns across the country, often carries decades of mergers behind it. Shop names are usually plain: a founder’s first name, a family name or, in the case of Casas Bahia, a tribute to the customers the business first served.

Characters do much of the talking. Several chains use a mascot or spokes-character in television advertising, on social media and in their apps. Magazine Luiza’s Lu began as a virtual sales assistant in 2003, according to Portuguese Wikipedia, and now appears in product videos; Casas Bahia’s Baianinho, a cartoon boy, was redrawn as a teenager in 2020 and restored to his classic look in 2026, trade press reported. Such characters can change with the company, and their redesigns are often discussed in public.

Screens now sit beside the shop. Apps and websites carry the same name and colours as the stores, and many retailers run marketplaces that sell goods from outside sellers under the retailer’s own banner. Television campaigns, seasonal sales events with their own names and printed or online catalogues complete the picture, as the companies publish them on their own channels.

Behind the shop fronts sit corporate pages. These usually give a founding story, name founders and owners, and, for listed companies, link to investor pages with filings on the B3, the São Paulo stock exchange. Restructurings, renamings and changes of control appear there as dated notices, which is often the clearest record of how a shop name has passed from one owner to the next.

A 2014 labour inspection.

Lojas Renner’s supply chain has been the subject of a labour inspection. Repórter Brasil reported on 28 November 2014 that labour inspectors from the São Paulo regional labour office, working with the Labour Prosecutor’s Office and the federal Public Defender’s Office, had held Renner responsible for 37 garment workers found in conditions classed as analogous to slavery at an outsourced sewing workshop in São Paulo, whose work reached the retailer through two supplier firms. Renner told the publication that it had worked with the Labour Ministry since being notified to ensure labour laws were followed.

On 2 December 2014 Repórter Brasil reported that the Labour Prosecutor’s Office had signed an emergency conduct-adjustment agreement with the two supplier firms covering payments to the workers and their reinstatement, and that the prosecutors stated the agreement did not release Lojas Renner from responsibility or recognise the supply chain as lawful.

For a design guide, Lojas Renner shows how a retailer can grow a family of separate store names, Renner, Camicado, Youcom and Ashua, around one listed company, while keeping a surname from a 1912 Porto Alegre factory. Compare Riachuelo and Marisa, two other Brazilian fashion chains. For this guide we use a deep red, a warm sand and a charcoal with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Lojas Renner’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.